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Posts Tagged ‘maya’

TurboSquid takes flight with a new featured image! TS Artist Triduza is actually a team of two artists who share duties behind the scenes: Alex, who creates the models, unwrap UVs, and rigging; and Anne, who paints the models’ vivid textures. We interviewed Alex about what inspires the pair, and about the friendly, competitive spirit that drives them to greater heights.

This year’s CheckMate Advisory Board Meeting was a rousing success! While we made sure to feed and entertain everyone while they were in New Orleans, 3D Modeling was, as usual, at the forefront of everyone’s minds. We also got to add a number of new board members, representing IKEA, Armstrong & White, as well as welcoming Michele Bousquet back in an Advisory Board role, given her track record with CheckMate. There were many roundtable discussions over the two-day, on-site meeting, and what the Advisory Board had to say about using TurboSquid models was surprising, even to us.

Over the next few months, we’ll be posting more specific information gathered from the meetings, but for now, we feel it’s important to give our dedicated artist community a quick recap on several major topics.

This is information that comes directly from the folks who are buying and using your 3D model content daily, and the insights they provided covered a broad range of industries and needs, from film and television, to architectural design, game development, advertising, news, and furniture manufacturing. Since you’re making models to sell on the site, we feel this kind of feedback is timely and worth reading.

We’re going to go over how to make a quad sphere in 3ds Max, Maya and Cinema 4D, for CheckMate Pro v2.

The default sphere is problematic because of the two poles. By itself, a standard sphere does not seem to pose any problems, but when it comes time to subdivide, the differences in polygon density at the equator and at the poles produces pinching, and squashes the sphere around the equator.

Click any screenshot below for full resolution.

Comparison of a Polygonal Sphere and a Quad Sphere

Here are the spheres unsmoothed.

When the spheres are smoothed, they both deform in different ways.

You can see how the Polygonal Sphere’s smoothing causes problems once a shader is added. Little ridges are created at the top of the sphere.

You can see the ridges with a chrome material applied also.

While the effect is subtle, you should be able to see the faint star pattern within the normal sphere at the poles where the lighting and reflections get distorted as the sphere is subdivided. Moreover, it can’t simply be fixed by removing every other edge that’s converging to that one vertex to make the pole faces quads. The distortion is a direct result of the fact that it’s a curved surface where the pole exists.

As such, a far better approach is to build a quad sphere, which not only eliminates this pole problem entirely, but is completely CheckMate Pro v2 compliant. Here’s how you can accomplish this quickly in each of the major 3D applications.